


and see the dawn of my return

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: (Its Consequences), Canon-Typical Family Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Family, Hurt/Comfort, Missions Gone Wrong, Returning Home, Scarif, Undercover Missions, lah'mu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-06
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 00:48:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13892715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: After pirates put a messy end to an otherwise successful mission on Naboo, injuring Cassian in the process, Jyn and Cassian are forced to take refuge on Lah'mu.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [incognitajones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/incognitajones/gifts).



> With thanks to venusmelody for a thoughtful beta, particularly the sage advice on getting bacta through Cassian's thick skull.
> 
> I hope you like this, Incognita! It was long enough that I thought it was best split in two.

"I need the secondary codes - here, pass me -"

 

Jyn handed over the thin strip of flimsi with a set of highly deniable temporary-use codes. It was risky, using such a slim cover, but it was _far_ too risky to build something complex on short notice on Naboo itself, Palpatine's birthplace. Rebellion simmered across the planet, but there was a reason the Naberries' money only moved when they were elsewhere, looking the other way, and being demonstrably good Imperial citizens - and a reason that the cell of middle-aged noblewomen Jyn and Cassian had visited kept their Rebel activities rigorously concealed and their mementoes of Queen Padmé Amidala sanitised. Jyn had been quite surprised to learn from the mission briefing that a slight, too-young martyr in heavy ceremonial dress had once stormed a palace held by the Trade Federation and founded the Alliance to Restore the Republic.

 

Naboo was beautiful and dangerous and waterlogged, and nobody knew when Palpatine might take one of his irregular fits of interest in the system, but the Naboo hadn’t forgotten their last free queen. Money, personnel, information and small technological innovations with no trademarks on trickled towards the Rebellion, who couldn't afford to ignore or deprioritise the planet, especially given the quality and value of the Naboo-based Faceless Ladies' intelligence. It was at their call that Forest and Oli Garrith had made a trade visit, turning a reasonable profit on the water-coloured semi-precious stones that were near-valueless on Ryloth but sold well on Naboo, filling their hold with Naboo watersilk of dubious provenance.

 

Friendly planet or no friendly planet, there was a threat in every corner. Jyn, strolling around Theed dressed as prosperous Oli Garrith with her nose in the air and her charming husband suitably close behind, had spent the entire week they'd been on Naboo trying not to twitch at shadows. She ignored Draven as a matter of policy, but his warnings had been too dire to set aside. And there had been rumours that Vader was on the move, and he was always at his most unpredictable around Naboo. Hatred for his master's planet, perhaps.

 

Here and now, breaking orbit but still nowhere close to safe, Jyn watched Cassian feed codes to their systems, answering the automated query from Naboo's inner security system, a net of sentry satellites. They had access to an astromech, as the Garriths would have done, but the Naboo - scarred by the Separatists and rich enough to put draconian counter-measures in place - had been demanding organic verification of ships' bona fides since the long-ago Crisis. R8-V5 was largely stuck minding the ship, managing the long hyperspace courses, carrying out the more elaborate encrypting, and returning preplanned responses of such blandness to Kaytoo's queries about Jyn and Cassian's welfare that Jyn suspected the droid of having a sense of humour.

 

Sure enough, a bored voice demanded verification. Cassian gave it. Jyn swung her legs over the side of her chair, and entertained herself by counting ways the verification could be fooled.

 

"How long until we get out of here?"

 

"Just need to get past these moons and the second safety net, and then I'll jump," Cassian murmured, intent on the ship's controls. Ahead of the viewport, Naboo's three small moons loomed increasingly large in the blackness of space, pale and largely barren except for the thick layers of reflective ice. "It'll be a few minutes. R-8, can I have the completed course, please?"

 

R-8 wheeled forwards and plugged itself into the ship's mainframe, and Cassian got up and moved back through the ship towards the fresher. Jyn tapped her fingers on the arm-rests of her chair and watched as the moons drew nearer.

 

She shifted in her seat. Her mother's crystal was digging into her ribs where it had been sewn into a pocket in her bra for safekeeping, and something was making her itch with nerves. Maybe it was the after-effects of socialising with so many Naboo, gracious and graceful and elaborate; Jyn, accustomed to smudged eyeliner and clothes not changed for a week, had found it difficult to be as unselfconscious as Cassian in the elegant outfits of a prosperous merchant. And any small slip could have been deadly. Cassian had coached her ruthlessly on the way to Naboo.

 

Once they'd gone to hyperspace she could put off Oli Garrith's persona and dress like herself again, but not yet.

 

The moons flashed vibrantly in the light of Naboo's sun, just cresting the edge of the planet, and Jyn squinted at them. The viewport filtered out most of the glitter, but still, it was very bright and confusing to the eye. The Naboo called them the Diamond Sisters, which was very pretty but very impractical when you were trying to see if the hint of something you'd picked up was a trick of the light or movement, on the moons' surface or just beyond it.

 

The outer safety net was beyond the moons, Jyn knew. The back of her neck began to prickle. She slid back into her seat and strapped herself in. "R-8, come here, things might be about to get messy."

 

The droid chirped a business-like acknowledgement at her and rolled into place, connecting seamlessly into the mainframe. Jyn scraped her teeth over her lower lip, and took a deep breath.

 

"Forest," she called in Oli's voice.

 

"What," Cassian called back, voice distorted by the door but still clearly using Forest's soft, slightly petulant tones.

 

Jyn swallowed, but didn't have to think of an answer. The comm crackled with such a loud hail Cassian could have heard it from the other end of the ship.

 

"Meteor class freighter AXX-B. State your name and credentials."

 

The voice sounded bored, light mid-Rim accent, cool and feminine. Jyn could have copied it in a heartbeat. And nothing about it had been in the mission briefing.

 

"Forest," she said, "what's this?"

 

Cassian shut the fresher door behind him and strode into the cockpit, toggling the channel open and taking on Forest's voice. "This is the _Queen of Despoina_ , flying from Naboo. Query. Who's asking for our credentials?"

 

"Naboo Security Force. State your name and credentials."

 

Cassian stared at Jyn.

 

"The official second layer of security is beyond the moons," Jyn said. "It's too soon. And the Imperial Navy runs it. Naboo's army barely exists. And they didn’t declare themselves. I've never known an Imperial who could shut up about it."

 

Cassian glanced out of the viewport, where the moons were still shining brightly enough to obscure anything in their penumbra, and then down at the radar, which showed nothing before the ring of satellites beyond the moons. "Pirates this close in seems unlikely, but whatever they are, they're well cloaked."

 

"State your name and credentials," said the voice, still bored, "or we will fire."

 

"Wait!" Jyn said, in Oli's voice, cool veneer of sophistication wearing off to reveal a thin edge of panic, playing for time. "Wait! Just, we weren't expecting you so soon, one moment -"

 

Cassian swore under his breath. "There," he said, quick and soft and vicious. "Coming out of the flash."

 

Jyn squinted. In the moment she managed to spot the menacing freighter and the two boarding vessels that dropped from its hangar bay, she registered something glowing as brightly as the Diamond Sisters - something red, not white - and a shock struck the _Queen of Despoina_ , shaking her from aft to stern. Cassian was thrown across the cockpit, where he hit the wall and crumpled to the floor, making R-8 scream a warning and Jyn catch a howl of horror between her teeth. She wasn't a brilliant pilot, but her hands were moving before she thought about it, throwing their ship around, trying to get out past the glare of the Sisters.

 

" _Cassian_!"

 

He didn't respond, and she could hear him sliding around the cockpit as she manoeuvred.

 

"R-8, get ready to jump. Jump to hyperspace."

 

R-8 queried where. Their flight pattern would not fit the present calculated course, and Captain Andor had insisted on a pattern that began further out, past the second safety net.

 

Jyn felt her breathing come quick and fast. "Just do it! Plot the course. Just - _shit_!"

 

A glancing hit struck too close to the hyperdrive. Jyn twisted the ship away and tried to hide behind one of the Sisters. She gritted her teeth and summoned up every ounce of deception she'd ever found in herself, and flicked the comm on, broadcasting on a broad channel, meant for general shipping but closely monitored by the Imperial Security Forces.

 

"Help!" she sobbed, in Oli Garrith's voice. "Help! Pirates within the safety nets! They've maimed my ship, I think they've killed my husband - he fell when they hit us and he's not - he's not moving - please help me, _help me_ \- this is Oli Garrith, on the - on the _Queen of Despoina_ \- Forest! _No!_ -"

 

She toggled the comm channel shut again, wiped the tears that had begun to bubble from her eyes, and forced panic away. Oli's panic, she told herself, not yours; but the distinction felt thinner when Cassian was still lying unconscious on the ground.

 

He had not fallen from a height this time, but he had fallen into exactly the same position as he had on Scarif, in the tower.

 

"R-8," she said gruffly, forcing calm, and was distantly shocked to hear Saw in her voice. "Now!"

 

The little ship jerked and leapt forward into hyperspace, and Jyn waited only to feel the movement of the ship even out and the tell-tale pale blue lines of blurred stars appear before ripping herself free from her seat and scrambling to Cassian's side.

 

"Cassian."

 

His eyelids flickered and his head lolled. A small frown crossed his face.

 

"Cassian! Come on." Jyn took one of his hands in hers and ran her thumb over the elegant, fine-boned back, then ruthlessly pressed a nail into one of his nailbeds. Jyn's nails were normally bitten short; Oli's were elaborate fakes, and Jyn had struggled to avoid breaking them so much that one of the Faceless Ladies had had to help her repair them. But they were long and sharp and much better for getting a reaction.

 

"Ow," Cassian murmured. "Jyn. _Basta_."

 

"Open your eyes for me. Now."

 

Cassian forced his eyes open. "Why?"

 

"You were knocked out. Do you remember?" Jyn let go of him with difficulty - an apparently reciprocal difficulty, because he curled one of his hands into the fabric of her layered dress - and leaned up to pull the cockpit first aid kit off the wall. They had a larger, hidden one, with tools in it that would have been difficult to explain away to a civilian inspector, but this would do until she could reassure herself Cassian wasn't going to develop a bleed on the brain and die right now.

 

"No." Cassian blinked up at her, his face soft with confusion, and then he frowned thunderously. "Was I thrown from my seat? Where was the belt?"

 

Jyn suppressed a hysterical snort. It came out as a gurgle. "You weren't looping the loop without your seatbelt on, if that's what bothers you."

 

Cassian wrinkled his nose and tried to bat away the pencil torch Jyn was shining at his face with unsteady hands. His pupils were the same size, though, reacted the same way. That was important, although Jyn couldn't remember why right now.

 

Jyn relented. "We were fired on by pirates. Within the safety net, which makes me wonder if they had Imperial collaboration. You were thrown across the cockpit and hit your head."

 

"Oh." Cassian put a hand to his head, and swore faintly in Alderaanian.

 

"Does your head hurt?"

 

"Of course my head hurts. What do _you_ think?"

 

"Cassian," Jyn snapped, and stopped herself. She took a long, shuddering breath and shut her eyes, curling her hands into fists and pressing them into the front of her thighs, forcing herself to be calm.

 

He should have been safe. If he hadn't needed the fresher, or if Jyn had been able to stall for another five minutes, or... But none of that had happened, and instead he'd been knocked unconscious and thrown around the cabin like a fallen corpse, incapable of protecting himself. She should have been protecting him.

 

Fine job she'd done of it. Saw would have been disappointed - less by her failure than by her forgetting his earliest lessons.

 

_Safety is a lie. And protection is a promise you can't keep._

 

When she opened her eyes again, Cassian was watching her warily from under half-closed lids, dark eyes sparking under his lashes.

 

"Please," Jyn said. The words shook as much as her hands. "Please. I thought you'd broken your neck. Let me take care of you."

 

Cassian nodded slowly, and one of his hands curled around hers, the fingers threading through carefully. She swallowed hard, and smiled without showing her teeth. He smiled back carefully.

 

"My head does hurt," he said. "Nodding made me feel dizzy. And I feel sick. But my neck doesn't hurt, I can move all my limbs, and I'm not seeing double."

 

 _I'd get up if I wasn't worried about you_ , Jyn heard, and selfishly refused to feel glad.

 

"Okay," Jyn said. "Do you mind if I - check your head?"

 

"No," Cassian said.

 

Jyn set the pencil torch down. Its grip had left a pattern on the flesh of her right palm; she glimpsed it as she ran her hands through Cassian's soft dark hair, over his scalp, checking for soft spots or blood. She found a little blood, but no gut-churning dips or ominous softness. The scalp had been cut, but there was no fracture.

 

She let Cassian sit up a little - he was shakier than she thought he had realised - and cleaned the blood out of his hair as best as she could with an antiseptic wipe. There wasn't much; the cut was a small one, and when she put pressure on it, the last of the sluggish blood flow stopped.

 

"I want you to take some bacta," Jyn said finally. "And rest."

 

"The ship," Cassian said.

 

"You'd better not be saying that you can fly better than me with a head injury," Jyn threatened, and was pleased to see a smile flicker across Cassian's face and lighten the discomfort lying heavy on his brow. "We're in hyperspace. R-8 and I can manage until we have to drop out again."

 

"We haven't got that much fuel," Cassian pointed out. The Naboo favoured using their own plasma and its derivatives, or natural charges fuelled by their hydropower stations, for ships the size of Jyn and Cassian's. The _Queen of Despoina_ ran on neither of these, and it was expensive to refuel her on Naboo itself. Forest Garrith spent a lot of time griping about the need for an upgrade.

 

"I know," Jyn said. "I'll sort it out."

 

Cassian nodded, and then winced.

 

"Come on," Jyn said, hauling him upright. His feet were clearly unsteady beneath him, and when she got him all the way up she thought he might be sick, but he put an arm round her shoulders and clutched the wall of the cockpit and didn't throw up or fall. "That's right. One step at a time."

 

Cassian smiled down at her, the kind of soft smile he only wore when they were alone, and she smiled helplessly back at him.

 

"Kaytoo will kill me for letting you get this hurt," she said.

 

"He'll call me an idiot for being out of place and give us all a lecture on the uselessness of organic waste systems."

 

Jyn choked on a laugh, settling him down on the bed that Forest and Oli Garrith shared and pulling his boots off. "Maybe," she said, sitting down on the floor cross-legged and opening the first aid kit. "Maybe."

 

There was a spray bottle of bacta in the larger first aid kit. Jyn handed it to Cassian and watched while he took it, pulling faces but not complaining. He'd probably grasped that Jyn would shove an entire canister up his nose herself if it would heal him.

 

“And your ears,” Jyn said, passing him a fresh disposable plastic nozzle.

 

“It’s only a concussion,” Cassian said, the most cautious registering of a protest that Jyn had ever heard from him.

 

“Just do it,” Jyn said, trying to hide her tension even though her hands kept half-clenching into fists. “How else is it meant to get to your brain?”

 

Cassian eyed her for a moment before, with obvious reluctance, spraying another few drops of bacta into his ears. He shuddered with reaction – it was never pleasant, Jyn knew, that liquid always too cool as it hit the inside of your ear – and almost rebelled over the eyedrops Jyn held out to him silently. But bacta was notoriously difficult to get through the skull, and Jyn didn’t feel like taking chances.

 

“This is unnecessary,” Cassian complained, swapping the eyedrops for the spray bottle and uncapping the eyedrops. “You’re wasting bacta.”  


“I’d rather waste a few drops now than risk your brain,” Jyn snapped, and then forced herself to take a breath and soften her voice. “Bodhi would be sad if you lost your head out here.”

 

“Well, we can’t have that,” Cassian muttered, trying and failing to apply the drops to his right eye. He swore in Ryl, and held the drops out to Jyn.

 

“Obviously not.” Jyn moved to the side of the bed, and Cassian’s arm wrapped around her waist as if by reflex. “Look, I just don’t want to take the risk.” She swallowed. “You wouldn’t, if it was me.”

 

“I know,” Cassian said, grip on her waist tightening slightly. “Just get it over with.”

 

The bacta was analgesic; Jyn was worried about giving him further painkillers, in case it masked a worsening of the headache that meant Cassian was seriously injured. (And what would she do if it did? a little voice with Saw's rough tones demanded. What could she do if it did?) Cassian didn't ask for them, even though the fall must have been hell on his spine.

 

That didn't tell her much. Cassian never asked for pain relief.

 

She sat down on the bed next to him. He rested his head against her thigh and closed his eyes, and she combed her fingers softly through his hair, watching his face smooth a little, the lines on his forehead ease.

 

Her jaw ached with all the words she didn't know how to say. Before she left, she leant down and pressed a kiss to his temple.

 

 

Back in the cockpit, Jyn sat down in the pilot's seat and took stock. R-8 warbled at her briefly.

 

"He'll be fine," Jyn said firmly, hoping she'd translated the Binary correctly, and that her declaration was right. She pulled one of the extendable screens towards her, and accessed the star map.

 

 _Come on, Erso. You need a plan._  

 

Oli Garrith had called for help on an Imperial wavelength. It was the only thing that could have allayed suspicion - just running would have made them look guilty enough for the Empire to investigate. But that meant that Oli, a wealthy merchant from Imperial Despoina, would submit a police report, so Jyn Erso would have to do so as well, despite the million-credit price on her head. She would also need to show the proper concern for her 'husband', without actually taking Cassian off the ship, where he'd be too vulnerable.

 

Jyn took a deep breath. R-8, like most astromechs designed for mainly internal use on a small yacht or single-pilot craft, had some med-droid programming. That was mentioned on his papers. She could use that, and flutter and panic and pretend that Oli couldn’t let Forest out of her sight - or cry, and babble about how relieved she was, only a small cut and a headache. Oli knew nothing about medicine, and she'd certainly never seen someone's brain choke on their own blood over a period of hours. She might not realise how serious it was, if Forest could stand up and walk and talk fairly normally.

 

So that was one problem. But they still needed to refuel, and submit a crime report, and then they needed somewhere to go after that, somewhere to hide. No matter what Jyn said or did, it was possible that the pirates had in fact been Imperials, and that their cover was bust - or that it would be, if any flaws were detected in her crime report. She couldn't lead the Empire back to the Rebellion.

 

Jyn looked again at the star map. R-8 warbled helpfully, and a ring appeared around a small bright spot. "Thanks," Jyn said absently, and zoomed in on it.

 

Cloud City. Just within the range of their available fuel, which made Jyn's heart pound, but neutral, uninterested in the names and details of its visitors, and led by a familiar face. Jyn was fairly sure she could keep Lando Calrissian occupied long enough to steal some fuel if necessary. He wouldn't even curse her if she did; he'd laugh.

 

"Okay," Jyn murmured, and set it as a waypoint. Two hours' hyperspace travel. Cassian would not be in a fit state to pilot by then. "You're going to have to help me with this, R-8."

 

R-8 bleeped a bland agreement. Jyn had to bite her tongue to stop herself chatting back at him.

 

She was altogether too used to Kay and his overabundance of personality. That was the problem.

 

Jyn zoomed out again, and started looking for a new waypoint. A refuge. Somewhere they could hide the ship and wait quietly for a while, disappear off the radar until the Alliance confirmed they hadn't been tagged and released... somewhere where, if necessary, they could keep running. She didn’t think there was a tag on the ship, but she hadn't yet run a full diagnostic. She'd searched the ship during pre-flight checks, but it was possible something had been attached during the brief fight.

 

Jyn scanned through planet after planet, moon after moon, and found them unsuitable. Nothing she knew well enough, nothing that was easily habitable, and too much with an Imperial presence. Her heart sank, and she collected fistfuls of contingency options, second choices.

 

There was a kind of inevitability to her choice, in the end. The only one that fit the profile and was close enough.

 

"Set course for Lah'mu, please," she told R-8. (Please. There was a time when she would never have bothered to say 'please' to a droid.) "And wake me in an hour."

 

She went back to the berth Cassian lay in, and shook his shoulder gently. He knew where he was when he woke, and who she was, and he seemed normal, if sleepy. More bacta would be pointless, a waste; Jyn's hand hovered over the bottles for a moment before falling to her lap.

 

Cassian's hand curled round her waist. She leaned down and kissed his temple, and he smiled in his sleep.

 

Jyn unlaced her high, elaborately detailed boots, pulled off her stupid layered dress, and dropped both on the floor. She stepped out of her leggings with more care, and left those on the floor too. Then she slid into Cassian's arms and turned her back to him, so that she fitted against him like key and lock, like blaster and cartridge, and wrapped her hand around his wrist.

 

She fell asleep counting his breath against her back and his pulse under her thumb.

 

 

Cloud City went fine. Cassian was awake, and behaving normally, and lying about the fact that his head still hurt, but Jyn knew enough to know that that too was normal. The cut on his scalp had closed; Jyn washed his hair for him in the sink and covered the bruises purpling over his shoulders and back in salve.

 

There were surgical scars all up Cassian's back; she knew every one, had mapped them with fingers and tongue and guilty conscience. To see blood blooming darkly under the skin around the marks Cassian had brought back from Scarif -

 

"You think too hard," Cassian said, rough like he was trying to startle her out of a silence he must know was ominous. "Are we cleared for take-off?"

 

"Yes." Jyn slid forward on the edge of the bunk they were both sitting on, so she could curve the leg folded up on the bed around Cassian's hips and put her arms around his waist. She rested her chin on his shoulder, and pressed herself as carefully and lightly as she could against his back.

 

Wherever they were, Cassian ran cold and hated it. He'd complained unceasingly about taking off his shirt for the salve. Jyn felt him relax back into her, felt his face turn towards hers.

 

"We have a few minutes," she said, breathing him in. "We have time."

 

 

 

Cassian slept unevenly all the way to Lah'mu. He should have got up and helped with the piloting - Jyn could fly, for a given definition of 'fly' that involved a certain haziness on smooth landings, but he was much better. He lay there knowing that, still dizzy and sick with the cold peppermint scent of bacta infesting his skull, and tried to get up occasionally; but Jyn always seemed to be there, to push him down and tell him not to be an idiot.

 

She must have strapped him into the bunk the last time she came to check on him, in case of a rocky landing. He faintly remembered her running through the classic questions with him and checking his responses, then stroking his hair off his forehead with a sort of rough, worried tenderness, brushing her lips over his and telling him to go back to sleep. He remembered nothing else between that and the settling rumble of the ship touching the ground.

 

Jyn did not immediately come back through. There was the sound of the ship's door depressurising and then opening, and her footsteps rang on the gangplank; a tendril of cold and mist curled inside the ship, and Cassian unstrapped himself, waiting for Jyn to give him some kind of signal. He didn’t know where he was, or what the plan was. To move too soon would be risky.

 

He pulled the blanket a little more comfortably over his shoulders and waited.

 

After a few moments, Jyn came back, her face a little flushed from the cold, the chill fog curling around her edges and lingering on her hands when she leaned down and kissed him. "Good. You're awake. Who's the current figurehead of the Rebellion?"

 

"Mon Mothma," Cassian said, passing over the unsubtle disrespect.

 

Jyn grinned and looked closely at his face, checking his pupils, pinching his earlobe to test a reaction. He swatted her away, squashing a smile. "How's the headache?"

 

"Fading," Cassian said, having considered lying and decided that it was unlikely to do anything other than upset Jyn.

 

She nodded. "Good."

 

And then, when Cassian expected her to tell him the plan, she fell silent.

 

He found one of her hands, and wrapped his own around it. She glanced down at him, half-distracted, and smiled - but it was a small, tight smile.

 

"We stopped to fuel on Cloud City and I filed a crime report in the name of Oli Garrith," she said. "No trouble. And no-one's looking for Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso - at least, not more than usual." She squeezes his hand fiercely. "And they're looking in the wrong sector under two different layers of codenames."

 

"That's good," Cassian said, waiting for the rest. "No-one made you put me in a mediclinic?"

 

Jyn snorted. "It's Cloud City. No-one gives you more than what you ask for. Not without a price." She rested her free hand over their clasped ones, and rolled her eyes. "And besides. Oli Garrith is an idiot who's never heard of a compression. Forest was up and talking, that was good enough for her."

 

Cassian's mouth twitched. Jyn had hated the vast majority of her cover. "So where are we now?"

 

"Lah'mu."

 

Cassian opened his mouth and closed it again.

 

"It was the only planet quiet enough," Jyn said, without looking at him. "I still know it. At least, the part where I grew up. We have - had - a lot of different escapes. Ways out." She flashed him a tight smile. "After Saw - I... looked around, here. There was still something left then."

 

Cassian tilted his chin down very slightly, the closest he could get to a nod without sloshing his brains around his skull.

 

"The Imps wiped out most of the continent," Jyn said very quietly. "And destroyed the grain stores of everything they didn’t burn to the ground." She stared up at the ceiling. "Orson Krennic..."

 

"... liked his vengeance," Cassian completed, and from the surprised way she looked at him she hadn't known even that much detail about the man in white who still haunted some of the very oldest nightmares Cassian had woken her from. "Draven had a file on him."

 

Jyn smiled effortfully. "And you had it word-perfect."

 

"Of course," Cassian said, just to see her smile widen. "Krennic was an obsessive and he liked his grand gestures. I read about what he did here. The Gamot filed a complaint with the Imperial Senate and it was mysteriously lost."

 

"Of course," Jyn echoed. She still had one of her hands tangled with his; she moved it into her lap, her fingers still clasping his own.

 

Jyn swallowed and shook her head. "We're in a big sea cave, two hours from the farm on a speeder. There’s one in the cave I haven't checked if it’s functional yet, but it should be – it was kept dry and fuelled, and the cave hasn't flooded. And it might be better if we're not with the ship. We're not being tracked, R-8 and I have been over the ship inside and out, but there's no way we'll look innocent if someone does find us."

 

"No," Cassian said dryly, and tried to get up. His head spun nauseatingly.

 

Jyn pushed him back down again; it was a mark of how ill he was, Cassian decided, that she didn’t need to use even half her strength to do it. "You need rest. I'll do it." She ran her fingers through his hair, pushing it off his face, and smiled down at him - but it was a thin and worried thing.

 

Cassian caught her hand in his and squeezed tightly. He could see the shadows of too many deaths on Jyn's face.

 

She leaned forward until her forehead rested against his, and stayed there for a moment, eyes closed, just breathing. Cassian raised his hand to stroke softly along the line of her neck, letting his fingers rest on the pearl of bone under thin skin at the base, and allowed his eyes to slide shut.

 

"I will be fine," he murmured, after a few moments. "We will be fine."

 

Jyn stiffened almost imperceptibly, and he nudged his face up to brush a kiss against her lips.

 

"You looked," Jyn said, her words jerky and ragged, her tone lifeless. "You looked like - when you fell."

 

Cassian's heart missed a beat. Jyn spoke only of the most painful memories in that tone: Onderon, Wobani, Lah'mu, Eadu.

 

Scarif.

 

"I climbed back up again," he answered, keeping his voice soft.

 

"I know," Jyn said. Her arms were folded either side of his head, giving her the leverage to lean over him without falling onto him. "I know."

 

 

After about another hour of lying still, periodically trying to get up, and sinking back into bed with a spinning head to be condescended to by R-8 - who had probably never even _used_ its medical programming before - Jyn came to get Cassian. She found him mid-lecture, and hid a smile very ineffectively.

 

"This droid is a tyrant," Cassian complained, just to see her smile burst out and hear R-8 bleep sanctimoniously.

 

"I'm thinking of requesting we work with him again," Jyn countered.

 

"Of course you are," Cassian sighed, and allowed himself to be helped up. It wasn't as bad as he feared, once the spinning had died down; he leaned heavily on Jyn and they walked slowly out of the ship to a loaded speeder. The air in the cave, dimly lit by the daylight coming from a narrow, craggy exit onto the land and the wide mouth open onto the sea, was damp and salty, but the bare rock where the speeder had been kept was dry, and a tarpaulin that had covered it was folded on the seat Jyn helped Cassian into. It was a four-seater, with additional, limited storage - an old-fashioned model, meant for all-terrain and favoured in the Outer Rim, with dull matte paint. Cassian leaned his head back against the seat and eyed the controls, which looked as if Galen Erso had been doing a little customising to match the cache of survival supplies well-hidden in the rocks and the concealed landing beacons he glimpsed at the edge of the arch, where the open sea flowed into the cave's pool.

 

He wondered how many boltholes like this Lyra the geologist had found and planned, how many secret places her engineer husband had fitted out. How many contingencies they had planned for.

 

None of it had mattered in the end.

 

Jyn came down the ramp carrying her rig for the truncheons she favoured, and climbed into the driver's seat. The truncheons were tossed into the back seat, and she strapped herself in.

 

"What about R-8?" Cassian asked, curious.

 

She didn't look at him, focussed on the controls. "He's staying to monitor our dead-drop message. In case Draven decides we're fine to come back in before the quarantine period ends and we get recall instructions." She lifted a commlink. "R-8'll let us know."

 

Cassian nodded very slightly, as if testing. His head still spun, but it wasn't so bad as it had been before; bacta worked slowly, but it _worked_. "This looks modified."

 

"It is. I checked under the hood."

 

"Have you ever flown it before?"

 

"Nope," Jyn said, tongue caught between her teeth as she engaged the engine. It shot forward, narrowly missing the _Queen of Despoina_ 's nose, and skimmed bumpily over the water before Jyn managed to impose control.

 

"Would you like me to fly it?" Cassian enquired, taking a firm grip on the handle beside him.

 

"Also no," Jyn said, steering the craft out of the mouth of the sea cave. "Just sit there and breathe in the fresh sea air, or something. It's good for you."

 

"I'm more worried about breathing in the fresh sea water," Cassian said tartly, and was rewarded by Jyn's laughter.

 

 

 

(I know my way back, Jyn thought, halfway to the farm nestled in the foothills. I know where I am.

 

She was more surprised than she had been at sixteen, when she had stolen a half-ruined hopper above the Great Divide and spent a week crossing the continent to get here, and her memory had suddenly flared to life high in the middle of a mountain pass, at the most distant of her mother's safe havens.

 

So much had happened since then. Eight years separated the child rescued from Lah'mu and the soldier who returned. But the Death Star had turned its light on Scarif and it had turned Jyn into something else -

 

And she still knew her way back.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Galen's message to Jyn comes from this gifset by jynandor on tumblr: https://rain-sleet-snow.tumblr.com/post/166153345151/jynandor-jyns-jaw-ached-clamped-shut-to-hold#notes
> 
> I have no idea if it is novelisation-based or what but it's fabulously heartbreaking.

 

The farm in the foothills was a small one, and out in the middle of the lines of rusting pieces of machinery was a crudely marked grave. Jyn brought the speeder to a halt beside the front door, and climbed out and went over to the grave. Cassian weighed his options for a few moments, and then - seeing Jyn looking small and hunched, and yanking on her mother's necklace with one rough hand - he got out and staggered over to join her. His arm over her shoulder was as much to keep himself upright as to comfort her, but she slipped her arm around his waist and leaned into the embrace. Holding him up; holding herself up.

 

The marker read _Lyra Erso_ , scratched and painted crudely but carefully on a large piece of slate set within a cairn. It gave a date of death, but nothing else, and the paint was weathered, the cairn partially scattered. This must have been built by Jyn herself, more than ten years ago.

 

"Is she buried here?" Cassian asked.

 

"No," Jyn said, and let out a long, shuddering sigh. "No body. Saw never told me about one and I didn’t find anything when I came back. Not even scraps. I think Krennic must have taken it. I looked once, and there's a publicly recorded flame for her in the Third Southern Quadrant Memory Garden in Coruscant, but you don't need ashes or bones to set up one of those." She fell silent for a moment, and then added, unnecessarily: "I've never been. I think - I think she hated Coruscant."

 

There was another long pause. Galen Erso had been given the posthumous status of a double agent; his spoken memory was ash and mud, but his sacrifices were recorded, at least, and every time someone scratched his name off a wall of the lost, Bodhi painted it back on again. People tended not to argue with Bodhi, these days, since doing so meant picking a fight with all of Rogue One and most of Rogue Squadron, and last time he had painted _Galen Erso_ on a wall, Princess Leia had stood beside him and held the paint pot. Three months later and the name was still there.

 

Lyra Erso - Lyra Erso was remembered in her daughter and in some of Chirrut's rituals, but this, to Cassian's knowledge, was the only static memorial Jyn had chosen to make of her mother. Jyn tended to keep her close, as if talking about her would wear out her few remaining memories of the woman. Officially speaking, the Rebellion knew little more than Lyra's name, profession and her connection to Saw Gerrera, and Lyra's living daughter had not been keen to fill in the gaps. It had taken Luke Skywalker weeks to weasel out of Jyn the information that the kyber crystal she wore was her mother’s.

 

"What about your parents?" Jyn asked, finally.

 

"Burned," Cassian said, and rested his cheek against Jyn's hair. "It wasn't a Festian tradition. They should have been taken up into the mountains. But there were so many bodies after the riot, the Republic governor said there was no space and it was unsanitary anyway, so..." He shrugged. "My uncles did what they could."

 

Jyn hummed under her breath, and the pressure of her arm around his waist increased slightly, carefully. Cassian knew she was thinking of Saw, who had also done what he could.

 

"Let's go inside," she said at last. "You need to be sitting down, at least."

 

Cassian couldn’t disagree with that.

 

 

The farmhouse door had been padlocked, and before it had been padlocked it had been locked shut. Jyn shot the padlock off and tried to slice the lock; discovering that it had been corrupted, she ripped away the circuitry that would have raised an alarm and shot out the lock instead.

 

"There'll be a draught now," Cassian joked.

 

Jyn grinned. "Most of the house is part underground, anyway."

 

She had remembered the house correctly. A higher antechamber led through a door - also locked, but Jyn sliced this one, less afflicted by the damp and the mould - to a small living space with shuttered alcoves for rooms, tiny, grimy high windows, and extremely dusty furniture, including a child's bunk with the sheets ripped off that made Cassian's heart constrict. The Imperials hadn't destroyed the house, probably for the same cruel but sentimental reasons that Krennic had taken Galen's wife's body and arranged for a memorial on a planet she hated - but it had been torn apart in search of something. Likely Krennic's men, looking for Galen Erso's work, and anything he might have concealed.

 

They'd missed a lot - Jyn's hiding place, Saw's name, the weaknesses of a structure such as the Death Star - but Galen had carried his contraband with him, and passed it only to his daughter.

 

The place was filthy and dark, the primary power sources having failed long ago. Jyn set an emergency lamp on the table and vanished to conceal the speeder and bring in what supplies they had; Cassian sat down before the generator and forced himself to focus on it. It was a model he recognised, another hardy, old-fashioned item popular on the Outer Rim for its exceptional reliability. Using his smaller, nimbler, unmutilated fingers to mend a similar model for the rebels on Fest had taught him his first and hardest lessons in mechanics, and the knowledge of its easily repurposed components had served him well when he moved on to mending droids and creating fatal power flaws in Imperial instalments.

 

By the time Jyn made her final trip down the stairs, brushing dirt off her hands, the generator had crackled into life, and a steady soft glow lit the farmhouse. Which only showed how much of a mess it was.

 

Cassian's head was throbbing. He rested it on his knees, and then pressed his palms into his eye sockets. Jyn moved behind him, and then her cool, grimy hands were resting over his forehead and temples, soothing him.

 

"You need more painkillers," she said. "And bacta. Just in case."

 

Cassian leaned back into her arms. "I won't argue."

 

"That's a shock." Jyn kissed his cheek; he smiled and did not answer her.

 

"Where did you put the speeder?"

 

"Behind the house. Under cover. I'll show you tomorrow, when it's not raining."

 

Cassian helped Jyn put some sheets on the larger bed - kept in a sturdy set of shelves built into the stone of the farmhouse, they had suffered less from rot, although the stormtroopers had left them in a heap on the floor. Jyn beat the dust out of them, and Cassian retreated to sit down and sneeze; when Jyn emerged grim-faced and grimy to her ears from the cloud, he stumbled forward again and tried to help her with the cleaner sheets. She let him, which he took more as a sign of her comfort in seeing him up and about than her belief that he could help her.

 

He took the bacta and the painkillers she had brought him without argument. "I turned the water back on. Don't know if it works, though." The stopcock had been in a carefully isolated box beside the generator, but getting up to check on the water supply once he had managed to wrench it from 'off' to 'on' had felt impossible.

 

"Thanks." Jyn sat down on the floor to help him with the laces of his boots, small face downturned and focussed, practical. There was a double line between her eyebrows that wasn't usually so firmly engraved, and when he touched her cheek gently with one hand and tilted her head up so he could see the other two-thirds of her expression she looked strained.

 

We're in her parents' home, and we're going to sleep in their bed, Cassian thought. This is the last place she ever thought was safe.

 

He curved his hand so that his palm cupped her jaw and tried to think what to say, but something must have passed across his face where words had failed him, because she smiled faintly and turned her face into his hand, kissing his palm.

 

"I'm glad you're here," she murmured. "This is. It's. It's easier, than it would have been alone."

 

He leaned his forehead against hers, and for just a moment, they breathed in the same air.

 

She still made him take a dose of bacta and painkillers before he slept, and crashed around the farmhouse restlessly as he dozed. She was trying to be quiet, he knew, as quiet as she could be slinking down an alleyway or sliding through air vents, but too unsettled to master the fine control of herself she'd had since she was a child. Saw Gerrera's most trustworthy weapon, misfiring.

 

It was late, he thought, when she slipped into bed, wearing pants and an ancient vest. She touched his head lightly where the blood had crusted over, and left a lingering kiss on his cheek. Then she folded one of her arms over his chest and one of her legs over his, and let out a very soft sigh. When Cassian drifted back into sleep, she was still curled too tightly against him, tense and waking.

 

 

The morning dawned much as Jyn remembered most mornings on Lah'mu: damp, grey, and cheerless. The vegetation that had run wild since the Ersos had been removed from the farm drank up the moisture, though, and the black shale took on a slick wet gleam, the mountains a chilled mystery, that tugged at Jyn's bones.

 

Jyn had thought there was nothing left of her childhood memories of Lah'mu, except for a few snatched moments that were more like mantras than memories now, and the events of their last day on the planet, which returned to her in her nightmares. Getting out of bed - before Cassian, who stirred and complained in heavily Festian-accented Alderaanian before he managed to fire enough brain cells to remember that Jyn's Alderaanian was still patchy - Jyn felt a million light years from the eight-year-old girl who had lived here, constantly on alert but never truly afraid. Every cell complained at her lack of real sleep, at the damp and the cold and the draining aftermath of her adrenaline-fuelled efforts of the previous day. She moved around the farmhouse clumsily, trying to adjust the broken heating and manage some kind of morning meal, and she was nothing like the child who had slept in the dusty, untouched alcove so nearby - and yet everything she looked at and felt so alienated from was also... the same.

 

She remembered kicking her heels against the legs of that chair. She remembered the wet chill of

Lah'mu in winter, the crunch of the shale underfoot. She remembered that lamp when it hadn't been broken, and the kitchen when it had been clean, and she remembered it all in such vivid detail she almost felt as if she might turn around, and suddenly the walls would be freshly painted and the smell of food coming from the oven -

 

She didn't remember feeling like this when she was sixteen, but she had still been lacquering over the loss of Saw with layers of anger and badly-brewed alcohol then. The combination made it difficult to remember anything from that trip.

 

The water was now running clear, after a burst of rust and dirt the previous night, but Jyn didn't trust it; it came directly from the rainwater butts, full to overflowing and pouring a steady stream of water from the failsafes, but the pipes and containers hadn’t been maintained for years. She put a kettle full of water on to boil, and poured it into jars that had once been meant for preserves to let it cool. She put another kettle on - the caf was dust, but the box of strong tea both her parents had favoured was miraculously still airtight, and might taste of something yet. Probably tannin.

 

Jyn walked out into the antechamber and swung open the door she had shot the lock off the previous evening, leaning against the door jamb and staring out into the fine grey rain. She didn't move even when she heard Cassian's slow footsteps behind her, but when he put his arms around her waist and rested his chin on her shoulder she turned her cheek against his face and folded her hand around his wrist like she had done on the _Queen of Despoina_ , feeling his pulse bump under her fingers. Around her neck, the commlink connecting her to R-8 clashed with her mother's crystal as she shifted.

 

"How are you feeling?" she said, without looking back at him.

 

"Better," he answered.

 

"And your back?"

 

A slight hesitation. "It's manageable."

 

"I'll help you with it later." Jyn counted beats under her fingertips, ticking them off against the rise and fall of his chest against her back, and her mother’s crystal was warmer on her skin than the commlink. She had been too little then to know about counting seconds to treasure them, but she wondered if her parents had.

 

"Was it like this when Krennic came?" Cassian asked, level and neutral.

 

"No," Jyn said, and turned away from the door, out of the bite of the wind. "This is winter. That was spring."

 

Inside the farmhouse, the kettle boiled.

 

 

Jyn felt trapped all day.

 

It wasn't the weather. She'd been out in worse, even if - here - there was nowhere to go. It wasn't Cassian watching her: he was being very careful not to do so, cataloguing her tells and movements in nothing more than brief sketching glimpses. It wasn’t the farmhouse, which was no smaller than she remembered - she'd had her adult height when she visited at sixteen, and it had felt small then, but comfortingly small, not confiningly so, the way it did now. She had even curled up in her childhood bed and dreamed well, and if she'd woken and cried because it wasn't real, at least she'd had the solace of believing that her life was the nightmare and her dream the reality. It wasn't the threat of Imperial pursuit, which Jyn was used to, and was beginning to think unlikely, in this context. It wasn't minding Cassian's injuries. The concussion was wearing off and the bruising fading. He needed less and less in the way of pain relief, and after Jyn helped him with the exercise and massage that helped with some of the damaged muscle in his back, he moved more easily.

 

Jyn stretched out all her muscles, did a large number of press-ups and sit-ups, cleaned all her kit, helped Cassian clean the farmhouse to the point where it looked habitable, and tried not to pace. It didn't work well. The memories followed her wherever she went.

 

Late in the afternoon, Jyn stepped outside in the rain and walked around the farmhouse, trying to lose the memories in the sheer physical sensation of moving, in the cold and the rain and the wind. It wasn't working when Cassian came out to find her; she kept feeling that uneasy sense of another time just beyond the edges of her fingertips, her father's hand catching hers, her swinging off his grip, the rain soaking both of them as they hurried home. Her mother wasn't with them, and Jyn couldn't think why; she tried to force the memories at the same time as she flinched away from them, and found herself confused and irritable and disoriented. She never thought about this normally. Lah'mu never came to mind, except in her nightmares. It stayed locked away, with her doll and the cave and the colour blaster fire turns when it hits your mother.

 

She needed to pull it together. If Imperials were to have followed them - Jyn had once harnessed feelings like this and smelted them down into anger, used them to fight like a cornered rat, but they didn't help with tactical thinking. They were only good when there was no other hope.

 

"Jyn," Cassian said, stepping directly into her path so that she startled and stumbled.

 

"You should be indoors," she said, automatically.

 

"So should you."

 

She let him lead her inside, and changed into drier clothes while he put the kettle on. When she went into the kitchen he was standing by it, leaning against the stained old counter, carefully not looking at her.

 

"I'm sorry," she said. "I - didn't think this would happen."

 

He didn't ask what she meant; she could see he already knew. He held out his hands to her and smiled slightly, ruefully; she crossed the room to join him and tangled her fingers tightly into his, turning her face up to his.

 

"I had a mission on Fest, once," Cassian said softly. "Not close to home, but in the nearest big city. Nothing was the same. Everything was the same."

 

Jyn folded herself against him.

 

"Yeah," she said, voice jerky and rough. "Yeah. That sounds right."

 

She stayed pressed against him until her breathing was normal again.

 

"I'm sorry," she repeated, words spitting out like she didn't want to let them go, and shook her head, burrowing her face into his shoulder. She could almost hear Saw rumbling an ominous warning. Letting her past take control of her like this...

 

" _Alma mía_ ," Cassian said, very low, into her hair. Jyn had forgotten the word; she wished she could remember what he meant. "You don't need to apologise."

 

She pulled her face back a few inches, looking up into his eyes; her hands slid up his chest, over the light padded dark blue jacket he was wearing against Lah'mu's pervasive chill, and cupped his jaw, the fragile column of his neck. He was smiling again, sadness touching his mouth and eyes.

 

"I don’t know," she said, "if I'd rather remember my parents and feel like this, or - not remember them at all, not remember - the good things, and never have to feel..."

 

Her voice trailed off, and Cassian set his hands on her hips, light enough to feel loose, firm enough to feel calming. She had never been as articulate as he was; actions spoke louder than words, in her philosophy, especially if the actions involved a truncheon. She searched for an adjective, and came up - finally - with the wrenching, howling pain inflicted by a stormtrooper who'd pulled Kestrel Dawn's left arm out of its socket like it was nothing. She'd been lucky there had been rebels on planet breaking up the temporary holding camp, if lucky was the word for someone who spent more than a year working off the cost of her food and medical care.

 

"Dislocated," she said. Cassian had once had all the fingers of one hand dislocated by someone who wanted to know what he looked like when he screamed; he'd understand.

 

"But it doesn’t matter in the end," she continued. "I don't have a choice. I am this way." She shrugged helplessly. "I can't _choose_ to have never lived my life like this."

 

Another man might have asked her if she _would_ choose to have lived her life without this pain - if she would, given the opportunity, turn Galen Erso down a less valuable destructive line of research, grant Lyra Erso more balance to her ferocity, have them live out quiet lives as far from the Empire as they could get, perhaps small cogs in some local rebellion or freedom trail, nothing too risky but not without value. It was a valid question. Cassian was too clever to ask it.

 

In any case - her first instinctive answer could only have been _no_ , too selfish to walk it back, to scatter Rogue One to their fates, to give up the only family she had known as an adult. To give up him. And she couldn’t face that.

 

Cassian raised his hands to her shoulders and stroked them softly down her arms. Jyn caught his hands with hers, and leant up on her toes to kiss him softly. His mouth opened readily under hers, and he moved into the kiss, his fingers tangling tightly with hers.

 

"How's the headache?" Jyn said, nipping at his lower lip and pulling away for half a breath of air.

 

"Gone," Cassian said.

 

"And your back?"

 

"Three out of ten," Cassian replied. He rested his forehead against hers. "As good as it’s going to get. I'm tired, though."

 

So was Jyn, deep in her bones.

 

"Let's go to bed," she said. "Get some sleep."

 

He kissed her temple, and she nudged her mouth into the place just under his jaw that always made him catch his breath. It worked, and that made her smile, though the expression felt rusty, ill-used.

 

"Mostly sleep," Cassian amended.

 

"That sounds good," Jyn said, closing her eyes. "Sounds... better."

 

When she eventually fell asleep, Cassian was running his fingers through her hair, soft and even; and on the very edge of wakefulness, she recognised something strange.

 

Here in the darkness of a broken and abandoned family home, she felt safe and warm.

 

 

On the second morning, Cassian woke before Jyn; she knew because she could feel him playing with her hair when she opened her eyes. She turned over in his arms and pressed her face into his shoulder. They might have succeeded with the water, but the heating had hissed and sputtered threateningly when they'd had worked on it, and they had unanimously decided that they could manage without. As a consequence, Jyn - accustomed to sticking an arm or a foot out of the blankets to compensate for Cassian's tendency to swaddle himself in as much warmth as possible - found herself waking up a little too cold.

 

"Your nose is freezing," Cassian observed, but she could hear the smile in his voice, and when she nipped at the flesh of his shoulder he almost laughed.

 

"This is Lah'mu," she said. "Everything's damp and cold."

 

"It could be worse," Cassian reminded her. "It could be Hoth."

 

Jyn groaned. "Can't we go somewhere warm for our next mission?"

 

"If Draven sends us to Tatooine, Jyn, I will blame you." Cassian sighed and shifted his arms around her, settling her that tiny bit closer.

 

Jyn snuggled into him. "How's your back?" she asked, one hand dancing lightly over the surgical scars and the slowly yellowing bruising.

 

"Fine." Or as fine as it would get, under the circumstances, but Jyn knew that.

 

"And your head?" Jyn's hand slid upwards to ruffle through his hair and find the cut where it had scabbed over, before diving hurriedly back under the covers.

 

"Better," Cassian said, burying his face in her hair. "And you? You feeling better?"

 

There was a long silence; it sounded like uneven breathing, fingers clutching nervously at a damaged kitchen counter, and _I can't choose to have never lived my life like this_.

 

"Yes," Jyn said finally. "I think so."

 

They stayed in bed for another two hours, drifting in and out of sleep.

 

 

Jyn eventually got out of bed because the hot water system was making a sad peeping noise and somebody needed to stop it. Shivering and swearing her way into leggings, boots and one of Cassian's shirts, she only realised how domestic this was after she'd adjusted the ancient and unresponsive thermostat and stumbled out of doors with a knife in her boot to check that there wasn't a contributing problem with the shielded piping on the outside of the farmhouse. The thought brought her up short, making her wonder if her mother had once climbed out of a warm bed to see to something that wasn't working and should be, but it didn’t _hurt_.

 

Jyn wiped rust from the pipes off her hands and noticed it wasn't raining. She stared upwards, and was surprised to find it wasn't even cloudy.

 

The skies had cleared to lilac, some time while they slept. Lilac, and painted with the distant texture of far-off clouds; the sun was pale and high, but it scattered the land with a faint warmth that struck a happier chord than Jyn expected.

 

"Cassian," she called, half-turning into the entryway, "come and look."

 

He was there in seconds with a loaded blaster, which said more about their lives than Jyn cared to reflect on. "What - Oh."

 

"Look," Jyn said, and took his free hand in hers.

 

" _Qué maravilloso_ ," Cassian murmured, half under his breath, and glanced at Jyn. "You didn't tell me the sky did this."

 

"I'd forgotten," Jyn said, with an absurd delight. How could she possibly have forgotten this, among all the things she had remembered? "It doesn’t usually last."

 

Cassian squeezed her fingers tightly. "It's..."

 

There was an audible pause while he searched for a word and evidently found all of his several languages inadequate.

 

"It reminds me of the mountains in Fest," he said at last. "We lived in the foothills of this one range, _El Espinazo_ \- the high places there, the quiet ones. They were beyond the scale of a word like beautiful."

 

They were silent for a long moment, and then the breeze caught them both crossways, and made them shiver.

 

"Put your coat on," Jyn said. "There are places I want to show you."

 

 

She took him to the Erso family’s safe houses – another set of routes she thought she had forgotten but had not. Her feet had carried her to every last one, aged sixteen and starving already, and they carried her there again now. The alcove in the high rocks where Galen built a radio transmitter, the cave where a small family could have hidden and lived off a groundspring and hydroponics for weeks. (The hydroponics were broken and the plants had first grown out of control and then died: there was nothing left of them now.) The route up into the mountains Galen and Lyra had disguised with a false rockfall, still passable if you knew the way. Jyn scrambled over it and emptied the cache just around the next corner to show Cassian, who could have managed the climb if necessary, but probably shouldn’t. Nothing in there had been truly perishable, kept in the dry thanks to Lyra’s caution and in the cold thanks to Lah’mu’s climate, though the water would be stale if she tried to drink it. The ration bars were fine, she tucked them into her pockets, but the chocolate wrapped in shiny plastic packets she shared with Cassian.

 

“These were my mother’s favourites,” she said without thinking, one bite in, salted caramel and chocolate bursting over her tongue.

 

“They’re good,” Cassian said, politely overlooking the surprise she could feel on her face. She hadn’t known that about Lyra until she said it out loud.

 

Jyn glanced at the red wrapper. “I don’t think they make them any more.”

 

“They do,” Cassian said, examining his own. “Different brand name. Maybe a slightly different recipe.” He stuffed the wrapper into his pocket and ate the last of the chocolate.

 

“Hm.” Jyn put her own wrapper away – it wouldn’t do to leave traces of their passage – and looked up into the sky.

 

“Did she have a sweet tooth?”

 

“I don’t remember,” Jyn said. “I just remember that she liked these.” She looked at Cassian and shrugged.

 

“You never talk about her.”

 

Jyn reached for her crystal instinctively and ran her thumb over its blunted edges. Kyber crystal, Chirrut had told her, the right size and shape for a lightsabre. He hadn’t worked in the crystal fields, where Jedi sometimes came if their visions called them – it had been Baze who’d spent half his time down there, guardian of Jedha’s most sacred resource – but it had been Chirrut who had examined her crystal and told her what he thought. (Baze’s memories of the crystal fields tended to devolve into rants about the Jedi, of whom, it seemed, he had only ever vaguely approved.) Sometimes Jyn wondered exactly how much her parents had never told her about themselves, and how much had never been recorded about her mother.

  
Then again, how much can you tell a six-year-old on the run? And if you have, in the past, associated yourself with the Jedi, how much can you dare to write down?

 

“I never know what to say,” Jyn said, staring up at the sky, which was still purple.

 

She knew what to say about Galen. She knew what to say about Saw. Most of it was an answer rather than a statement freely made, and could said with her fists or the stare she had learned in Wobani, the one that said _I will paint your blood all over this floor and I’ll like it_.

 

Her mother was different. For the Rebellion, in the coldest sense, she’d been nothing like a means to an end – that end being Jyn, who herself had been a means to an end: first Saw, and then Galen. Her memories of her mother were few and precious, and Jyn felt no duty to give them up to a group of people who didn’t care that Lyra had lived and died, only that she’d married the architect of the Death Star, and that she had borne a daughter who had fought on Scarif.  Jyn had even sliced into her own records and excised the mention of her necklace from her description and habits.

 

She cleared her throat. “You don’t talk about your family a lot, either.”

 

“It’s easier if as many people as possible know as few details as possible,” Cassian said. “It makes it simpler to give them whatever story is necessary, and in the meantime, they can tell themselves whatever they like.” He shrugged the same way Jyn had. “The best lies are the ones other people invent for you.” His eyes caught and held hers. “And there are not a lot of people around who I think need to know the truth.”

 

Inexplicably, Jyn found herself smiling. She started the walk down the rocky path that had led them here. Her feet were moving without her conscious input again, but she knew where she was going.

 

“The mountains you mentioned,” she said. “ _El Espinazo_. Were they like this?”

 

“No,” Cassian said, stumbling over a loose bit of rock. She caught his arm and steadied him. “No shale. They were made of granite, and they were drier. And decorated, though that stopped when I was a baby. I went back ten years ago and the colours were completely gone.”

 

“Why?”

 

“No money for paint,” Cassian said. “Not even sacred paint.” He scraped his teeth over his lower lip. “The Republic taxed Fest into the ground, but the Empire was never any better. There’s no more money than there was before, and… the knowledge has been lost by now.”

 

“If you can remember what it looked like,” Jyn began.

 

“Very little.” Cassian smiled as he cut her off. “We were not religious.”

 

“But it was important to you.”

 

They were silent for a while. Jyn was leading them back to the farmhouse, but not by a very direct route. She had walked this with her parents so many times in reverse, practising a route that might take them all to safety – or at least another lease of temporary freedom.

 

 “It isn’t something I will forget,” Cassian conceded. “We’ll go, someday.”

 

Someday – meaning after the war, a time which occasionally seemed real, and mostly did not.

 

Jyn’s feet came to a halt outside a cave which seemed a lot smaller than it had done when she was six. If she thought about it, which she preferred not to, this was also a place she might have told Cassian she’d bring him someday. And what did it say about her that she would have brought him somewhere she’d hidden from stormtroopers, while he would take her to a beautiful, sacred mountain range near where he’d been born? Probably nothing good.

 

Out of habit, Jyn pulled her torch from her pocket and checked it was working and had a spare battery in its compartment before entering the cave. She registered Cassian doing the same behind her, and felt her lips twitch; almost a smile.

 

She led him into the cave, her torch shining from the moment she stepped into its shadow. The hiding place was exactly where she remembered: she was pleased for her parents and their long-gone skill when Cassian walked straight past it. She held the torch between her teeth while she opened it, the weight light for an adult woman but the catch sticky with rust and age. Shining a small circle of light down into the darkness she could see only dust and the bench she had sat on as a child.

 

There were bunks, she remembered. Bunks and several days’ supplies, only some of which she had eaten before Saw had come, conserving her food as if her parents would need it too even though she had known they were dead or gone or both. The hideaway had only been meant to be a waystation, a stopgap, but her parents had been cautious people in their own way. It was just that caution hadn’t been enough, with an empire’s resources and Krennic’s obsession to contend with.

 

Jyn tested the ladder with one foot. It rang true. Torch now tucked into her belt, still turned on, she climbed down into the bunker: the torch slipped halfway down, and she stifled a sharp indrawn breath before realising that though her torch had fallen and rolled away with a clatter, there was still light from Cassian’s torch, shone directly down the ladder for her.

  
When she looked up, his face was carefully blank.

 

There was time for her to find the torch before he began to climb down to join her. She had to get down on her hands and knees to pull it from under the bench, and she was still checking it over, absently brushing the dust from her trousers with one hand, when his feet hit the ground.

 

“Small,” Cassian observed, poking around. “Well-planned.”

 

“I was down here for two days,” Jyn said.

 

“Alone,” Cassian confirmed, though he already knew it.

 

She nodded. “The lamp broke.” She cast around with her torch – it had been here somewhere. She knew she had left it. “It stayed lit for a day and a half and then it started to go. There were supposed to be others but I couldn’t find them.” As much as Galen and Lyra had taught her, Jyn knew from an adult’s perspective on their lessons that they had never planned for her to have to escape alone.

 

Cassian’s parents probably hadn’t thought that they would both die in the riot, either.

 

The beam of light caught on a dusty gleam of clear plastic in a corner. Jyn went to it and picked the lamp up in hands that felt numb, that were surprised to catch a finger on the sharp edge of the plastic and bleed.

 

She shook it, almost expecting it to flicker to life and then die again. It didn’t.

 

She dropped it, and it fell with a crunch underfoot. She kicked it for good measure, and put her finger in her mouth to suck the copper stain of blood away.

 

“You were happy at the farmhouse,” Cassian said. He was watching her: she could feel the weight of those changeable dark eyes on her shoulders. “Until Krennic came.”

 

Jyn removed her finger from her mouth. “Yes. They were good parents.”  


“They planned to survive.”

 

She took a deep breath and nodded. She’d been too young at eight and too bitter at sixteen to see it, but here and now she was old enough and clever enough to see that they had had a network of contingency plans, and every last one of them had failed them.

 

Cassian moved a step closer.

 

She turned her body half towards him, but didn’t look away from the broken lantern. “Are there parents who expect that they won’t?”

 

“Kes Dameron,” Cassian said. “Shara Bey.”

 

Jyn thought of the pictures of Poe Kes had shown her, the string of rather chewed wooden beads Shara wore around her neck, uniform or no uniform. Poe wasn’t eight. He wasn’t even six. And Kes and Shara built everything they did on the hope that he would never have to join their fight, but they still used that hope for a foundation, and Jyn knew, standing here in her dusty footprints, that hope was never going to be enough for her. She was confident it would not be enough for Cassian either.

 

“If we ever,” Jyn said, thinking of a choice she’d made at some point last year, when a shoddy implant from the Outer Rim had failed at an inopportune moment. She hadn’t hesitated. “I mean – Children.”

 

“Not until after the war is truly over,” Cassian said.

 

She nodded. “Not when the treaties are signed. After that. When it’s _over_. We can talk about it.”

 

When, not if, and assuming they would both still be alive, assuming that the Rebellion would win. Other assumptions were too painful to make.

 

Jyn leaned into Cassian. “We’ll have plans too,” she said, muffled in the shoulder of his jacket. “Ours will work.”

 

He pressed his mouth against the top of her head, and for a long minute he didn’t answer.

 

“Ours won’t have to work,” he said, eventually, his voice rougher and lower than usual.

 

“Better,” Jyn said, closing her eyes against the small dusty bunker and the lamp on the floor, no more use than it had been when she was eight, and it was dying.

 

She stamped on it once more before they left.

 

 

The light outside was brighter and clearer than Jyn had realised, tucked inside a cave that would have been completely pitch-black if it hadn’t been for the light of the torches. But there were grey clouds creeping in from the sea, so they hurried a little, back to the farmhouse, which was still not warm but did have food and hot water.

 

There was still no sign of any Imperial pursuit; R-8 reported nothing when Jyn contacted him. She started the food going, and swapped over with Cassian when he appeared with wet hair and fresh clothing. In the fresher she remembered that strange feeling of domesticity that she’d had that morning, checking the pipes because something was making a funny noise instead of carrying out inventory on her weapons because she needed to be able to kill. It had returned with their mundane conversation about dinner, the almost instinctive way they’d taken turns, and like her memories of Lah’mu she couldn’t shake it, but unlike them it was… comfortable.

 

Soaping her hair and combing through it with her fingers, Jyn thought of her father’s message, the one she’d heard on her knees in the rough orange dust of Saw’s catacombs, from a wavering blue hologram of a man half the galaxy wanted dead and the other half wanted to use.

 

_If you found a place in the galaxy untouched by war. Quiet life, maybe with a family. If you’re happy, Jyn, then that’s more than enough._

 

Quiet life, Jyn thought. Maybe with a family.

 

The hot water spat rust, cut out, and turned to cold.

 

“¡ _Verga_!” Jyn bawled, leaping out of the fresher with suds dripping from her skin, and added a string of Huttese for good measure as she scrambled for a towel and her clothes.

 

“That has to be the first time I’ve heard you speak Alderaanian spontaneously,” Cassian remarked, standing in the doorway and lowering his blaster now he could see she was unharmed. “Of course you were swearing.”

 

“Fuck you,” Jyn snapped, twisting the fresher dial until the water stopped and wrapping her wet hair up in the towel. “You got an entire hot shower.”

 

The look of sympathy that had been wavering on his face turned into an outright grin. “But I made dinner.”

 

“You watched it while I washed, it’s not the same thing.”  
  
“It’s hot and edible. Do you care?”

 

“No,” Jyn grumbled.

 

 

They ate outside, backs against the wall. The clouds had miraculously dissipated, or at least spread over the sky further to the east, and the triple moons shone more or less clearly in the slowly deepening violet of the atmosphere. Given the broken heating, it wasn’t appreciably colder outdoors than in, but they’d both decided that it would be stupid to light a fire and risk excessive visibility. They could be reasonably sure no-one Imperial had followed them here, Jyn pointed out, but if a teenager on a stolen hopper had made it all the way down here once, someone else could do it again. Maybe someone looking to set up farms here. The land was profitable enough, even after the Empire’s little salt and burn operation.

 

Jyn’s hair dried slowly. She set aside her metal plate while Cassian was still eating, and leant her head against his shoulder. He nudged his head against hers, and went back to finishing his meal; she had almost drifted off, and the sky had turned to mulberry, when she heard the clatter of him putting his plate down, and felt his arm settle around her shoulders, his hand brushing a strand of her hair behind one ear.

 

“It’s still wet,” she said, raising her head. “I shouldn’t have washed it.”  


“It won’t make you sick.” Cassian kissed her ear.

 

“I know that,” Jyn said. She dug in her pockets, and found a little circle of elastic at the bottom of one; silently, she held it out to Cassian, who smiled, and made space for her to shuffle in front of him and sit between his knees.

 

His fingers sifted gently through her damp hair, pulling apart snarls: she closed her eyes again, and felt the callouses on his skin catch softly against her scalp.

 

“You never told me where you learned to do this,” she murmured.

 

“My sister. She survived until I was fourteen.”

 

Jyn turned round to kiss him, and Cassian lost his grip on the sections. He curled his hand into the back of her jacket, and ran his fingers through the places where the sections had rested, obliterating any trace of them.

 

“I’ll have to redo that now,” he said.

  
“I can live with it,” Jyn said tartly, twisting back round. “Tell me about her.”

 

“Her name was Tielo,” Cassian said. “She was older than me.” Jyn had known this before: Cassian had given her the names like a litany, the first time the Rebellion’s official day of mourning – and semi-official bacchanalia, with accompanying apocalyptic hangovers – had rolled around. She held her head still and waited. “Tielo is usually a boy’s name. Our parents were not good at guessing and never asked the meddroid, which is why I was nearly Cassia.”

 

Jyn smiled. “Did Tielo tell you that?”

 

“No. An uncle.” Cassian sorted her hair back into sections. “My mother’s favourite brother. Tielo hated him, she called him a collaborator, but she would trust me with him, sometimes.”

 

“I don’t know what my father thought of Saw,” Jyn observed. “Or the other way round.”

 

“Saw never talked about him?”

 

“No. He gave me a new name and a false history.” Jyn fidgeted with her cuff, and the knife tucked under her sleeve out of habit. “He mentioned my mother sometimes, when we were alone, but never my father.”  
  
Cassian paused. The distant but raucous cawing of a marsh-bird among the paddies filled the silence, and in its echoes Jyn heard _I like to think he’s dead; it makes it easier._

 

“Tell me about Tielo,” she said.

 

“She was very good at explosives,” Cassian said, starting to braid again, and added thoughtfully “and weaving, sewing, braiding – she said it was all fine motor control, nimble fingers.”

 

“So she taught you to braid so you could make bombs?”  
  
“She taught me to braid because holding her arms above her head that long gave her cramps and it annoyed her,” Cassian said, startling a laugh from Jyn. “But yes, it turned out to be good for… complex wiring.”

 

“Life skills,” Jyn said. “I never learned to braid. I didn’t get the hang of it before my parents died, and after that I didn’t want to. I just cut it off, mostly.”

 

“What you do looks pretty,” Cassian said absently. Jyn smiled and leaned back into him. “That makes it very difficult for me to braid your hair.”

 

She snorted and leaned forward again. “Sorry.”

 

Several moments later, she said: “I wish I could have met Tielo.”

 

“I would have liked to meet Lyra,” Cassian answered. Saw and Galen hovered between them in silence – but it had not been Cassian who killed Galen, and Saw had, at the very last, chosen his death.

 

Jyn’s eyes rested on the shadow of Lyra Erso’s only material memorial, just visible in the gathering dusk, and she smiled at the dead and let them go.  
  
Cassian finished off the braid and kissed the nape of her neck; put his arms around her, and rested his head on her shoulders.

 

The sky had turned to aubergine, and all the stars were out.

 

 

 

The commlink woke them up in the middle of the night, beeping: a direct transmission from a ship overhead, relayed by R-8. Cassian seized it and turned it on as Jyn rolled onto her back.

 

“Evening, lovebirds!” Han Solo sang cheerfully. “Enjoying your honeymoon?”

 

Cassian threw the commlink across the room.

 

Jyn snorted, and got up to fetch it. “What time do you call this, Solo?”

 

“Rescue time, Erso. Heard you and the hotshot were in some trouble, thought I’d swing by and help.”

 

“I’ve met more helpful piles of bantha dung. Our ship isn’t badly damaged; I reported that. We’re just quarantining ourselves.”  
  
“Fine,” Han said peaceably. “Her worshipfulness says you’re clean and insisted we drop by to check on you. It’s not orders from that scowling asshole Andor calls a commanding officer, she’s just being friendly.”

 

“That’s more like it.” Jyn sighed. “Are you under time pressure or pursuit?”

 

“I don’t get _pursued_.”

 

“Except by bounty hunters. Any more Fetts or Banes on your tail? An Aurra Sing or two to tell us about?”

 

“Cad Bane died in a cantina brawl three years ago. Have some respect for the dead.”

 

“I hope they fed his corpse to something nice.” Jyn glanced at Cassian, who had wrapped himself in the blankets and pulled a pillow over his head. “Look, Han. What time do you think it is?”

 

“About ten p.m.?”

 

Jyn banged her head gently against the wall. “Shipboard clock on the _Falcon_ is out of sync again. Go away and fix it. We’ll be with you in four hours.”

 

“Five,” Cassian said, muffled but definite.

 

“Five,” Jyn corrected. “Erso over.”

 

She turned off the commlink and joined Cassian in bed. He stroked a hand down her back, and tugged lightly on the end of her slightly messy plait like it was a joke. She chuckled at him and pressed a kiss into the corner of his mouth.

 

“How’s your head?” she said, sliding her fingers into his hair. The cut on his scalp had scabbed over well.

 

“Ten out of ten,” Cassian said, and added unkindly “unless you count the headache in orbit on a light Corellian freighter.”

 

She laughed, and he caught her laughter with a kiss. Morning would come soon enough, but it didn’t have to be right now.

 

 

**CODA**

 

Several months later, Kes Dameron – Jyn’s favourite member of the over-worked and unscrupulous band of accountants who kept the Rebellion in boots and blasters – sent Jyn a message with the subject line _Nice one_.

 

Jyn, who had recently returned from a mission to Onderon and was covered in jungle muck and insect bites, had no idea what it could be. She wasn’t expecting a message from anyone not a member of Rogue One, it wasn’t anyone’s birthday, and she hadn’t recently been out drinking with Shara, so Kes couldn’t possibly be blaming her for a hangover or passing on blackmail material. Nor did she often communicate professionally with Kes. Any tips Intelligence sent through to Accounting generally went through Draven.

 

Jyn opened the message and found that it was a copy of a missive from the Imperial Navy (Chommell Sector), Reparations Division. It apologised to Master Merchant Olisandra Griffith for the inconvenience and distress caused to her and her husband Forest by the recent pirate attack within Naboo airspace. It also notified Master Merchant Griffith of the opportunity to act as a witness in court against the dastardly pirate ring, should she feel able to do so, and credited a significant sum of money to the Despoina account Draven had had set up for Oli and Forest’s cover.

 

 _5%_ _finder’s fee credited to you_ , Kes had written underneath the copy. _Call it back wages._

 

Jyn sat down on the floor and laughed until she cried.


End file.
